Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  Did not the framers of the Constitution imagine that there would be circumstances when a man not elected would have to be called in for the good of society?9

  ‘Rajaji should seek an early opportunity to get himself elected to the popular House,’ wrote The Hindu (2.4.52). C.R. was unmoved. With himself C.R. may have argued that he was entitled to set his own terms for a job that was being pushed on him. Also, had he not opposed elections ‘on principle’? But should such an opponent enter an elected body?

  The haste with which C.R. was nominated and chosen leader, and the obvious decision to present everybody, including Nehru, with a fait accompli, also left an unpleasant taste. Yet, given C.R.’s firm stand regarding a by-election, the exclusion of Nehru, and therefore speed, was essential. Raja and Sri Prakasa calculated that while Nehru was not likely to agree to C.R.’s terms ahead of time, he would hesitate to disturb an arrangement once it had been made.

  The judgement was vindicated. Though put out for some days by Sri Prakasa’s word that Chief Minister Rajaji would not contest a by-election, Nehru was soon engaged in friendly correspondence with C.R. about the latter’s Ministry. C.R. told Nehru:

  I am struggling to find a team who may inspire confidence. The field is very limited and poor (4.4.52).

  The tricky exercise took C.R. nine days during which he allowed few to know his mind. Then he acted with finality. Producing a list of 15 including himself, he declared that ‘all appointments are closed’ (The Hindu, 11.4.52). Many of the chosen learnt of their luck from newspapers or on the radio. On 10 April they were sworn in.

  Apart from Manickavelu Naicker, head of the Commonweal Party, which had 6 MLAs, the rest were Congressmen. C.R. was keen to have the eminent and independent educator, Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar, as number two. It was an astute thought. The presence of Mudaliar, esteemed both in anti- Brahmin and Brahmin circles, would have weakened the opposition that C.R. was bound to receive from the former, but Mudaliar declined.

  The support of all groups except the Communists was invited by C.R., and he even issued a public welcome to Prakasam. The latter spurned it but a number of independents and the smaller parties responded, even though, barring the case of Manickavelu Naicker, office had not been offered. C.R.’s majority was obvious from the day the Assembly first met, and the vote of confidence that followed went 200 to 151 in C.R.’s favour.

  Shrewdly and mercilessly, C.R. played on the unexpressed yet very real fear of the Communists harboured by many of the MLAs sitting with them on the opposition benches. In his first Assembly speech he said:

  I am here to save my country from the traps and the dangers of the Communist party. (Applause). That is my policy from A to Z. I am placing my cards on the table. I am your enemy number one, and may I say you are my enemy number one. This is my policy.

  And what is the Communist policy? Every difficulty, every discontent, every complaint must be taken up, expanded, exaggerated, repeated, added to, rolled on and made to grow like a snowball . . .

  The public’s chief concern was food. Lengthening ration-shop queues and soaring open-market prices of rice had played an important part in Congress’s electoral setback. Asked by a reporter, ‘Will there be an increase in the food ration?’ the Chief Minister replied, ‘You must pray for rain’ (The Hindu, 11.4.52).

  He repeated the advice in a broadcast.

  In the Assembly there were taunts. ‘The Congress is relieved that Rajaji is at the helm, and Rajaji is relieved that God is at the helm,’ said a Communist member. Asking if the scoffers had better methods of inducing rain, C.R. added, ‘No irony, no sarcasm or ridicule, no cocksureness of upstartist knowledge can shake me from my faith in God.’

  Fortunately for C.R. and the people of the South, rain arrived; almost unbelievably, it arrived in early May. The waters came pouring down, emboldening C.R. to move in a direction towards which the long queues for rice had often nudged him: decontrol.

  Convinced that there were stocks in the countryside, and confident now that they would soon be replenished, he decided, a month after taking office, to remove the controls on the distribution and price of rice.

  Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, the new Food Minister in Delhi, agreeing, C.R. announced decontrol. Within days grain started to flow and the queues disappeared. At least for a year C.R.’s decontrol was such a success that even the Communists did not oppose it.

  Another popular measure was an ordinance, later replaced by an Act, that aided small tenants and farm labourers in Tanjore district, the granary of the Tamil country. Following clashes between landlords and tenants, many evictions had been ordered in the area. The new law prohibited evictions, enabled restoration if eviction had taken place, and put up the labourers’ wages.

  The province’s handloom weavers, feeding some five million mouths, were also given some relief, and C.R. strove hard but unsuccessfully to reserve all weaving of coloured saris and bordered dhotis for them. His Assembly voted unanimously for the proposal, but the Centre disallowed it.

  His rule, in short, was going down very well. The crowds he was attracting were large, and there were unfounded stories that taking advantage of his obvious popularity C.R. would go in for a snap election.

  Disarmingly C.R. had said, ‘I was in a different world, with the characters of the Ramayana, and I have forgotten everything about the legislature here’ (The Hindu, 2.4.52). But MLAs found that his skills were intact, as when there was a demand to know what C.R. had written to Nehru about the formation of a new Andhra state.

  C.R.: It is a confidential letter.

  Viswanatham: Under what provision of the law is the correspondence treated as confidential.

  C.R.: These are letters from one gentleman to another and gentlemen’s correspondence is always private.10

  Having to face his strong personality, his ministerial colleagues did not initiate much. ‘He will be the Member, the rest of you numbers,’ Kamaraj had warned Pattabhirama Rao, one of the younger Ministers.11 Obeying C.R.’s instructions, the Ministers kept the corridors of Fort St. George clear of partymen, which meant that officials ‘felt free to do their duty according to their lights,’ as one of them, M.V. Subramaniam, would put it. Subramaniam would add that ‘the administration was toned up to a level that has not been reached before or after, since independence.’12

  C.R.’s industry made a mockery of his earlier talk of fatigue. ‘On an average,’ he told the Assembly, ‘I see 100 files a day. Each has a problem, a tragedy or a history behind it.’13 His candour, too, was striking. Thus a radio appeal for a public loan would start as follows: ‘Very poor people, please switch off, this appeal is not intended for you’!14 It was not dull working under a Chief Minister like this, who also produced memorable phrases at will. For example, a few weeks after saying how he viewed the Communists, he told the Assembly: ‘Let me now name my enemy number two — the Public Works Department.’15

  Yet what impressed officials did not carry the party. While conscious that it owed its current fortune to C.R., Congress nonetheless disliked some of his utterances, as when he said to a huge beach audience that the shrinkage in Congress’s strength was ‘good for democracy’ and proved ‘the South’s intelligence,’ and added: ‘I have been called to sweep away the cobwebs and clean the drains of the houses of Congress’ (The Hindu, 2.4.52).

  In any case, he could not really clean Congress without controlling it. Lacking the stamina and patience for party management, he spurned all suggestions that he take over the TNCC. Kamaraj, who had left the TNCC presidentship following the electoral setback, soon resumed the charge.

  It was time to carve out Andhra, the battlecry of all the Telugu MLAs before and after the elections. Those in the opposition spoke only in Telugu, which C.R. understood and in which he occasionally replied. Unlike the Mahatma, who saw practical worth in linguistic provinces, C.R. thought they would impede national intercourse and economic advance. Nehru and, before his death, Patel were of a similar mind, but the virtually unanim
ous Telugu sentiment could not be denied. After Potti Sriramulu died fasting for a separate Andhra, New Delhi yielded.

  ‘The sooner it is put through, the better,’ C.R. advised Nehru in December 1952.16 Simultaneously, he said that Madras city, where Tamils greatly outnumbered Telugus, could not go to Andhra. Yet proximity, old links and their reading of history had persuaded many Telugus that the city had to go with Andhra. Or, argued Prakasam, who had formed an action council over the issue, the city should be turned into a joint capital or a union territory.

  Opposing the demand, C.R. was not willing even to see Madras as Andhra’s temporary capital. Admitting that many Telugus would call him ‘ungenerous, hard and partisan,’ he claimed he was saving the future from disputes.17 At the same time he put his foot down against a Tamil demand for Tirupati. That his remote ancestor Nallan Chakravarti had lived in the temple city was immaterial, as was an old Tamil text referring to Tirupati as the northern boundary of the Tamil country. Only numbers mattered, and in Tirupati these were clearly in Andhra’s favour.

  To escape from charges of partiality, C.R. proposed, to Nehru and Sri Prakasa, that he should resign as Chief Minister and President’s rule for the province should follow, enabling officials to partition it. But there was little question of Nehru accepting such a suggestion; as for Sri Prakasa, he simply said to C.R., ‘If you go, I hope you will please allow me also to go.’18

  Happily, mistrust was forgotten by the time the state formally split on 1 October 1953. In the Assembly Tamil MLAs offered Andhra their good wishes, and Telugu MLAs, their battle won, spoke in English. ‘We shall feel the pain of it when there is nobody to give us trouble,’ said C.R., adding that he would particularly miss the ‘young and bright faces’ of the Andhra Communists with whom he had crossed swords.19

  The Communists received a jolt. Deserting their company, Prakasam became Andhra’s first Chief Minister — through Congress support. It was a development that C.R. had publicly and privately espoused.20 When Prakasam went to C.R.’s home to share his joy, C.R. did not allow his visitor, six years’ older than him, to climb the Bazlulla Road steps. The two talked in Prakasam’s car. C.R. expressed his gladness, and the eyes of the lion of Andhra were wet.21

  The ‘tired old man’ was putting to shame his ministerial colleagues, some of whom were half his age, sailing unflinchingly into the sea of files at Fort St. George, facing questions and debates in the two houses, touring a district a month, and keeping up a daily schedule of correspondence, visitors, talks and functions. But he never ceased reminding himself of his age and fragility. In an engagements diary he would note, ‘Ill for the last three days,’ ‘The hernia has burst on the left also,’ and so forth. After calling on C.R. in the autumn of 1952, the American author Louis Fischer wrote to him:

  May I now gently chide you? You told me yesterday that you were a frail boy and had always been frail, and yet you have managed to live with your frailty to 73. So why can’t you continue to be frail and live on and on . . .22

  Almost daily he found diversion in books — amazingly, his eyes were cooperating. Police officials anxious about a likely riot and desirous of instructions would visit Bazlulla Road in the morning and find the Chief Minister ‘lounging in an easy chair, reading.’23 And C.R. would spend minutes on chores that were perfectly needless and perfectly charming. Thus he would pen author R.K. Narayan a note:

  Sometimes good luck brings about a combination of time and mood and I read one of your contributions in the Hindu. And then I am bewitched by the talent and sparkle of it and a joy overwhelms me . . .24

  Or he would read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey twice over, finding it ‘wonderfully good’ — and then inform the publishers of misprints he had noticed. Or, spotting an archaic phrase in a government order (‘His Excellency the Governor is pleased to declare Madras city a cholera-affected area’), he would instruct a change. Or he would advise The Hindu on how Tamil vowels should be spelt in English, or propose ingenious and indeed sensible reforms for the Hindi script to Govind Ballabh Pant, the UP Chief Minister, who had merely wanted C.R. to bless a conference on script reform.

  Callers included Aneurin Bevan, Edwina Mountbatten, Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson, and the US Vice-President, Richard Nixon. For Nixon, the encounter with Rajaji was ‘the most memorable’ of a trip on which he ‘met scores of Presidents and princes and Prime Ministers.’25 However, according to Henry Ramsey, the American Consul General in Madras at the time, C.R. himself was ‘not highly impressed’ with Nixon.26

  If some interesting faces appeared before him, others were, simply, disappearing. Rama Rao reminded him that at their age milestones were tombstones. Erskine, his 1937-9 Governor, Muniswami Pillai, one of C.R.’s staunchest Harijan allies, Gopalaswami Iyengar, who had been his colleague in the Delhi Cabinet, and two close Muslim friends, Asaf Ali and Shafique- ur-Rahman, died. Thirty years earlier, Rahman had been C.R.’s companion in Vellore Jail. C.R. recalled him as a ‘saint in the disguise of a citizen.’27

  T.S.S. Rajan, friend of forty years, died in Trichy. Earlier, C.R. had secretly taken an overnight train to see the ailing Rajan and flown back to Madras in time for the day’s work. And T. Vijiaraghavachariar — T.V. — whom he had met at the turn of the century in Salem, went. C.R.’s 1953 engagements diary contains the following jottings:

  Feb. 21: T.V. very ill and suffering. Feb. 28: T.V. passed away last night and I got the information this morning. My heart is made of stone and I don’t weep.

  Apart from hearing sad news, C.R. was having to do unpleasant things. Madras city’s tramway had to be closed. Rebelling police constables had to be rounded up and some dismissed. Requests of intimate friends had to be turned down. A.V. Raman, close since Salem days, sought a grant for completing an English- Tamil dictionary, a project that C.R. had encouraged over the years. Now, however, he was unwilling to extend governmental help. Raman’s son would recall that ‘a curt official communication rejecting the request hurt my father deeply.’28

  When Rama Rao asked for an introduction to Morarji Desai, Bombay’s Chief Minister, C.R. first gave the following note (14.2.53): ‘My dear Morarji, Sri Navaratna Rama Rao is an old classmate and lifelong friend who just wishes to pay his respects to you . . . He is the best English scholar I know of in India and a very dear friend.’ Soon, however, C.R. asked his friend why he wished to meet Morarji. Admitting that he had had a business interest in mind, Rama Rao returned C.R.’s introduction.

  Rising levels of water in the province’s reservoirs and of money in its coffers would fill C.R.’s heart with satisfaction. ‘The rains have been ample and the districts are thoroughly under cultivation,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Not an inch left out’ (27.11.53). Likewise, ‘The loan has been heavily oversubscribed. Nine crores for five crores’ (23.7.53).

  His spirits were fed, too, as his jottings testify, by the warmth and size of the crowds he drew on his tours. Thus (about Madura), ‘Deeply touched by what I saw.’ ‘At Trichy. Enormous big public meeting.’

  With audiences in a hall he was as much of a hit as ever. To Presidency College students he said: ‘Education does not consist in carrying a very heavy load of knowledge in your head. Will you call a donkey which carries a heavy load of clothes on its back a well-dressed one?’29 While in a car together, Narasimhan asked his father how he found his similes. Replied C.R.:

  My difficulty is not in finding but in choosing and rejecting. Everything is a simile — this car, the trees, the crows, the lamp-post . . .30

  His random 1953 jottings, consisting of up to six sentences put down every few days, reveal his interests and opinions, and at times some inner experiences.

  17.6.53: What a dream I had last night. It is now more than 12 hours after I got up from it. But the pain and terror still continue . . . I was in abject want and I begged for Rs 5 from people I did not know and I was disappointed. I have lost my way, missed my train and all that on numerous nights. But this i
s the first experience of this kind.

  9.7.53: Enjoying Cicero. More his letters than his superbly eloquent essays . . . Letters show politics of Rome 2000 years ago as of today.

  10.8.53: Saw Gemini Vasan’s picture Avvaiyar. T.K. Shanmugam’s play is a hundred times superior to this picture . . . A lot of stock scenes of thunder, lightning and storm, of water flowing and elephants trooping and cardboard fortresses falling . . . The music is execrable!

  25.11.53: Went to Thorapalli. What a ruin and what squalor! The river and the old tamarind trees were the only things that remained to bring forth the old days to mind. It was melancholy altogether to go to this place which was so dear in my childhood . . . What poverty all over and all round! This is India indeed after 70 years.

  But reawakened memories fought the disappointment, and to cousin Singaramma — daughter of uncle Ramaswami Iyengar — who was living in ‘the old, old house,’ C.R. spoke of their grandmother Rangamma:

  Rangamma’s father gave this house to her. Don’t sell it. I want to be cremated here near the river.

  Some Thorapalli villagers said to him: ‘You have achieved so much, but why have you done nothing for Thorapalli?’ Replied the village’s greatest son: ‘A man earns and gives his earnings to his wife, who feeds all the guests first. Only if anything is left can she eat.’

  The separation of Andhra meant the end of C.R.’s indispensability. In the residuary province, Congress MLAs constituted a majority and were capable of ruling without C.R.’s help. He wanted to resign and, as we have seen, said so to Nehru, who, however, stamped out the idea. ‘I am sorry I cannot think of releasing you,’ Jawaharlal wrote (12.2.53). It was Nehru’s assessment — as one of his Ministers, Mahavir Tyagi, had informed C.R. — that ‘Rajaji has saved Madras for us.’31